I AM THE LITTLE GIRL IN THE CHAIR AT WRAMC …ARNETT , PATRICIA S. 3731021 D-EM-USA F7 WARD 17 WRAMC 3-19-55 EXPERIMENTED ON AT THE HANDS OF NASI SCIENTIST EWEN CAMERON AND DR. GOTTLIEB . MK-ULTRA AND RADIATION AND INJECTIONS OF UNKNOWN TOXINS AND MIND CONTROL .

As a child I always thought the pain was normal . There are controllers assigned to the victims and some might even be a family member that is receiving money . There is a lot more to my story ….too painful to talk about . I also got beaten as a child for telling the truth …by my own mother …so maybe she was my controller …I don’t know , but the hell has followed me all of my life and affected my children , marriages and has set me into severe depression . Let’s put it this way ….No one in the last thousand years had the problems that now exist because our government decided to take our lives away from us in their quest for experimentation .

I contacted my Congressman and he was given the run around with my case for over three years . My case went Walter Reed , The Department of Energy , The Department Of Defense , The Department of The Army , Bethesda Army Navy Intelligence , To Army Doctors in Virginia that sent a letter trying to downplay everything by only talking about the surgery and not addressing the MK-Ultra stuff that was done to me , then the case was forwarded back to The Department of Defense . My case went to Bill Clinton ( no response ) Senator McCain , he sent it to Senator Diane Feinstein . They are waiting for me to die as I am 67 …so they don’t have to pay me and this is what they are doing to everyone …” violate out civil rights with permanent injuries against our will and then ignore us and not pay us for what they did ! Crimes against humanity !

Hi , I just want to say that what you experienced is real ! Regular people that have no clue can’t comprehend that our own government did such things to people and children and yes some died and I almost died also . They try to explain it away with mental illness because it’s only our word to back it up . No one would know what I said was true if it wasn’t for the photos of me in the chair on this page as a child . The other guy commented and tried to make sense of something he has no idea of what happened to us and tried to explain it away with how the government needed intelligence ! How does that justify rape of children and innocent people ? You stand your ground as you know what they did was horrific and wrong and it can never be justified . In my case they are waiting for me to die so that what they did to me will die with me and I will never see any compensation . I have beat on every government door for justice and they just keep passing my file around and try to explain it away like I am nothing . This is what’s happening to you also I assume and I am so sorry that all of this happened to you and it is an ongoing shell shock experience for all of us . Good luck to you and hope that someday we will all see some kind of compensation and justice . Sincerely Pat Arnett .

I now have Congressman McCarthy working on my case for 2 years with The Pentagon , Bethesda Army / Navy and The Dept.Of Energy for my abduction from ward 17 at WRAMC . I was there for an experimental surgery …two days later I was taken by Dr. Ewen Cameron and Dr. Gottleib to an isolated room in the basement of Walter Reed . I am the 7 year old child in the chair above on this page where the Nazi scientist had me screaming in horrific pain until no sound was coming out of me while I was still screaming . I had a total of 4 experiments done to me at Walter Reed in 1955 .

Legal evidence exist which prove that my public claims, about my having, involuntarily, been subjected to human experimentation.

At the above picture the reader may see my mother’s, Olga Bompola, Will.

At this document, and specifically at the bottom end, there is a direct claim that my personal security is being threatened by a specific individual the identity of which is specified. This individual, for the past approximately forty years, is my, so called, “controller”.

The American services enlisted the “controller”, during the ‘80s at the U.S.A. by manipulated him in order to comit a fraud related to certain forged bank checks. Then, from what it seems, they “drugged and maddened him with opiates beforehand” in order to perpetrate a long sequence of crimes, against me and against other members of my family.

Legal evidence about some of these crimes I have included in certain of my previous articles, specifically:

The issue of the involuntary human experimentation is inseparably intertwined with, the issue of human organ/tisues smuggling, the issue of involuntary enlisting to the non-uniformed colonizing army, and the issue of entryism/extortion against the most wealthy and powerfull individuals in the world.

About this complex of issues, due to a part of my social cyrcle and due to my unintentional past experiences, I know many things and probably, too many things.

From the year 2010 and then, it seems that, on behalf of the colonizing Nations’ services, there may be a systematic effort towards imposing on me, by their using of illegitimate means and probably “face saving” false excuses, such conditions within which It would be impossible for me to reach the public opinion and disclose everything that I know.

These, who have bought smuggled human organ/tissues, they have broken the law not only by receiving stolen goods but also because they become complicit to the murders of any existing and lawful, eye witnesses, if such murders, actually, become committed.

Christos Boumpoulis

economist

Appendix

Mind Control Experiments on Children

By Jon Rappoport

The CIA mind-control apparatus has been well known since 1975, when 10 large boxes of documents were released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Several good books were then written on the subject of the CIA program known as MK-ULTRA. Officially spanning ten years from 1952-62, MK-ULTRA involved the use of LSD on unwitting military and civilian subjects in the United States. LSD and more powerful compounds were given under duress as brainwashing and truth serum drugs. The program’s aim was to find drugs which would irresistibly bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject’s mind clean and program him or her as “a robot agent.”

In experimental test situations, people were given acid without their knowledge, then interrogated under bright lights with doctors sitting in the background taking notes. Threats would be made. The test subjects were told that their LSD “downer trips” would be extended indefinitely if they refused to reveal their closely-guarded military secrets. The people being interrogated in this way were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel and, abroad, agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term severe debilitation and several documented deaths resulted. Much, much more could be said about MK-ULTRA.

None of this prepared people for the explosive testimony made on March 15, 1995, in Washington, D.C., before the President’s Committee on Radiation, however. In unpublicized sessions, New Orleans therapist Valerie Wolf introduced two of her patients who had uncovered memories of being part of extensive CIA brainwashing programs as young children (in one case, starting at age seven). Their brainwashing included torture, rape, electroshock, powerful drugs, hypnosis and death threats. According to their testimony, the CIA then induced amnesia to prevent their recalling these terrifying sessions.

Both Wolf and her patients stated that they recovered the memories of this CIA program without regression or hypnosis techniques. In other words, these patients spontaneously discovered this information about themselves and their pasts.

Although the committee was mainly concerned with radiation, they permitted Valerie and her patients to testify because, astonishingly, several doctors who had administered the mind-control experiments had also been identified by other Americans secretly exposed to radiation. Apparently there was a crossover.

Prominent names surfaced in the March 15 testimony: Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MK-ULTRA and Dr. John Gittinger, Gottlieb’s protege. These men and others were directly accused of participating in grisly mind-control efforts on children.

Predictably, this testimony received no media attention.

I now have it all, including many pages submitted to the committee that will likely never be released as part of their final report. Only a small percentage of the pages were read aloud at the hearing. Included are corroborating statements from other therapists around the country and several of their patients. I have now released all of this testimony as a book, U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments On Children.

When the sickening shock starts to wear off, deeply disturbing questions flood one’s mind: just what was this CIA program? How extensive was it? What was its purpose?

From what I have been able to discover so far, many American children, as well as children from Mexico and South America, were used over a period of about 40 years, starting around 1948. In fact, the program may still be going on. Doctors and agents who administered it wanted to obtain control over the minds of these children, ostensibly to create superagents who wouldn’t remember even what missions they carried out, because of hypnotically induced amnesia (which could be removed by their controllers and reinstalled at will).1

Children were trained as sex agents, for example, with the job of blackmailing prominent Americans - primarily politicians, businessmen and educators. A great deal of filming was done for this purpose. Eventually, people from the inner core of the CIA program filmed each other, and some of the centres where children were used as sex agents got out of control and turned into CIA-operated sex rings.

Some children were considered expendable and simply murdered.

One person who states that he was in this program as a child said, off the record:

“They tried out their brainwashing techniques on the kids from Mexico and South America. They were considered expendable. But on another echelon of the program, they went after the best and the brightest American kids. Making perfect agents to combat the Soviets wasn’t, I don’t think, their ultimate objective. I can’t remember what that was.”

At this point, I made a suggestion:

“Well, if they were choosing the best and brightest, maybe they figured these kids would one day rise to important positions in the society, and they wanted to gain long-term control over them, so they would be under their thumb, so they could tap them at will - a way of controlling the future society.”

“Maybe,” he said. “The Nazis gained control over the intelligentsia in Germany. That was a very key step in their dominance. That was the first thing they did”.

“This smells very much like a Nazi program in the U.S.,” I said. “I don’t mean all the controllers were German, but the style of it, the insanity.”

He said, “They brought over a lot of Nazi doctors after the war and not just to build rockets - for a lot of projects.”

Other people who said that they had been used as children in the program remember that doctors with German accents were definitely present at the sessions. One therapist, who shared this information informally with colleagues around the country, states that, so far, the oldest person she has heard of who was in the program is now 52; the youngest is now nine.

Since a number of people who were brainwashed, tortured and drugged in these experiments try to resolve their experiences in therapy, psychiatrists and other professional therapists are hearing these stories. They are told, for example, that CIA controllers sometimes dressed up in Satanic costumes to further traumatize the children, also providing a cover that wouldn’t be believed if the children ever talked.

It is worth noting that there is a movement to discredit these “recovered” memories, and the most prominent group, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), has several board members with CIA or military-intelligence connections - including the notorious Dr. Louis “Jolly” West of UCLA, who tried to establish a center for “the study of violence” at the university in the 1970s. This center’s specialty would have been psychosurgery, a horrendous melting of brain connections, supposedly to curb people’s “violent tendencies.”

FMSF maintains that a person always remembers abuse done to him or her, and therefore any new recovery of it in therapy is false and must have been fabricated through misleading suggestions by the therapist. While it is certainly true that such inducement happens in therapy, the blanket statement that all recovered memory is invented is unsubstantiated.

In a written statement to Dr. Wolf that was included in her testimony to the president’s committee, well-known researcher and psychiatrist, Colin Ross said,

“Published articles in my files include descriptions of administration of 150 mcg of LSD to children age 5-10 years on a daily basis for days, weeks, months, and in a few cases even years. Neurosurgeons at Tulane, Yale, and Harvard did extensive research on brain electrode implants with intelligence funding, and combined brain implants with large numbers of drugs including hallucinogens.”

Ross based his report on his more than 20 years of investigating CIA mind control.

Chris De Nicola, one of Dr. Wolf’s patients who testified before the president’s committee, named her controller as a Dr. Greene, a name reported by several other mind-control subjects. It may well be that this name was a cover used by various CIA and military-contracted experimenter-torturers. Here is a quote from her testimony:

“[Dr. Greene] used me in radiation experiments both for the purpose of determining the effects of radiation on various parts of my body and to terrorize me as an additional trauma in the mind-control experiments. [She was eight years old.]

“The rest of the experiments took place in Tucson, Arizona, out in the desert. I was taught how to pick locks, be secretive, use my photographic memory to remember things and a technique to withhold information by repeating numbers to myself. [She is obviously talking about being trained as an agent.]

“Dr. Greene moved on to wanting me to kill dolls that looked like real children. I stabbed a doll with a spear once after being severely tortured, but the next time I refused. He used many techniques but as I got older I resisted more and more.

“He often tied me down in a cage, which was near his office. Between 1972 and 1976 he and his assistants were sometimes careless and left the cage unlocked. Whenever physically possible, I snuck into his office and found files with reports and memos addressed to CIA and military personnel. Included in these files were project, subproject, subject and experiment names with some code numbers for radiation mind-control experiments which I have submitted in my written documentation. I was caught twice and Dr. Greene tortured me ruthlessly with electric shock, drugs, spinning on a table, putting shots in my stomach, in my back, dislocating my joints and hypnotic techniques to make me feel crazy and suicidal...”

Is there a precedent for this kind of sadistic treatment by CIA and military personnel? Indeed there is. Here is a quote from the introduction to my book, U.S. Government Mind-Control Experiments On Children. It contains information from reliable published sources; such as The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, by John Marks2, Acid Dreams, by Martin Lee3 and The Mind Manipulators, by Alan Scheflin4. In part, these authors derived their information on the CIA and MK-ULTRA from the ten boxes of information released suddenly in 1975 by the agency in response to Freedom of Information Act requests:

“Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University, as early as 1955, working for the Army, gave patients LSD while he had electrodes implanted deep inside their brains.

“Canadian researcher, Dr. Ewan Cameron, under long-term CIA contract, attempted to depattern, and reprogram his psychiatric patients’ personalities wholesale. He started with 15 to 65 days of ‘sleep therapy,’ during which a patient was kept under nearly 24 hours a day, through the administration of cocktails of Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal, Veronal, and Phenergam. Throughout this sleep period, the patient would be awakened two or three times a day for electroshock treatments, given at an intensity 20-40 times the ‘normal’ convulsion-producing strength.

“In the mid-1950’s, Paul Hoch, M.D., a man who would become Commissioner of Mental Hygiene for the State of New York, then a laborer in the field for the CIA, gave a ‘pseudoneurotic schizophrenic’ patient mescaline. The patient had a not-unfamiliar heaven-and-hell journey on the compound. But Hoch followed this up with a transorbital leucotomy... Hoch also gave a patient LSD, and a local anesthetic, and then proceeded to remove pieces of cerebral cortex, asking at various moments whether the patient’s perceptions were changing.”

Claudia Mullin, the other of Dr. Wolf’s patients who testified before the President’s Committee on Radiation, said her experiences with CIA mind-control experiences began when she was seven years old:

“In 1958, I was to be tested, they told me, by some important doctors coming from a place called the ‘Society’ [the Human Ecology Society, a CIA front]. I was told to cooperate; answer any of their questions. Then, since the test ‘might hurt,’ I would be given ‘shots, x-rays, and a few jolts of electricity.’ I was instructed not to look at anyone’s face too hard and to ignore names,’ as this was ‘a very secret project’ but to be brave and all those things would help me forget...

“A Dr. John Gittinger tested me and Dr. Cameron gave me the shocks and Dr. Greene the x-rays... By the time I left to go home, just like every time from then on, I would recall nothing of my tests or the different doctors. I would only remember whatever explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath [of Tulane Medical School] gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on my head and fingers and even the genital soreness. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Already, they had begun to control my mind!

“The next year, I was sent to a place in Maryland called Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to ‘sexually please men.’ Also, I was taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves. It was Richard Helms (Deputy Director of the CIA), Dr. Gottlieb, Captain George White and Morse Allen, who all planned on filming as many high government and agency officials and heads of academic institutions and foundations as possible... I was to become a regular little ‘spy’ for them, after that summer, eventually entrapping many unwitting men, including themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only nine when this kind of sexual humiliation began.”

Captain George White was a notorious agent for the CIA. He set up a brothel in San Francisco in the 1960s and, using hidden cameras, filmed men having sex with prostitutes. The men’s drinks were “spiked” with LSD. In 1950, Morse Allen, another important CIA man, was appointed head of Project BLUEBIRD, another CIA mind-control program.

Ms. Mullin states that she was adopted when she was two years old. By the time she reached seven she had already been abused extensively by her mother. Her mother apparently turned her over for “testing” to CIA-connected people and Claudia then entered a 27-year period of what can only be called enslavement. Claudia states that she has been monitored, that she is still monitored and watched by agency related people, including a medical doctor. Now living in New Orleans, she has given information to local police authorities about her situation. In her testimony to the president’s committee, Claudia remarked,

“Although the process of recalling these atrocities is certainly not an easy task, nor is it without some danger to myself and my family... I feel the risk is worth taking.”

Claudia’s therapist, Dr. Wolf, has written to the president’s committee,

“To the best of my knowledge, [Claudia] has read nothing about mind-control or CIA covert operations. Since she decided to listen carefully and remember as much as she could about conversations among the researchers, her memories are extraordinarily complete. I have sent written copies of memories to Dr. Alan Scheflin [author of The Mind Manipulators] for validation and he has confirmed that she has knowledge of events and people that are not published anywhere, that some of her memories contain new information and that some are already known and published. Some of her memories have been confirmed by family members. She has also shown me old scrapbooks where she wrote notes to remember what was happening to her and hid the notes under pictures in the scrapbook.”

I spoke with Alan Scheflin in May [1995] of this year. He said he had found one piece of information Claudia had mentioned in her recollections that had no precedent in published material. It involved a connection between two government researchers.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on the 130 pages of testimony given before the President’s Committee on Radiation, and it is also just the beginning of a history that will undoubtedly widen in the coming months and years. Dr. Wolf told me that when word got around she was going to testify before the president’s committee, she was contacted by about 40 therapists “in just the 10 days leading up to my trip to Washington.” The therapists had heard similar CIA mind-control stories from their own patients. Many of these professionals are afraid to go on the record about their patients’ stories, as censure from their professional societies is a reality. The political mood these days is not conducive to granting an aura of credibility to revelations of CIA brainwashing.

Unethical human experimentation in the United States describes numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have occurred throughout American history, but particularly in the 20th century.

The experiments include: the exposure of people to many chemical and biological weapons (including infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments like KX-338, interrogation and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children,[1] the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners[citation needed].

Funding for many of the experiments was provided by the United States government, especially the United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities.[2][3][4] The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.

The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975 and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.

In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful.[12]

In 1895, New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two mentally disabled boys—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year-old—with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.

In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study (including orphan children).

From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine.[48] From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.

The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of schoolchildren, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring the health effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.

From 1955 to 1960, Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop-off location for mentally handicapped children diagnosed with cerebral palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given spinal taps "for which they received no direct benefit." Reporters of 60 Minutes learned that in these five years, the brain of every child with cerebral palsy who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without parental consent. According to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died at the clinic.[64]

Immediately after World War II, researchers at Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were "vitamin drinks" that would improve the health of their babies. The mixtures contained radioactive iron and the researchers were determining how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. At least three children are known to have died from the experiments, from cancers and leukemia.[75][76] Four of the women's babies died from cancers as a result of the experiments, and the women experienced rashes, bruises, anemia, hair/tooth loss, and cancer.[60]

From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track "how nutrients were digested". The children were not told that they were being fed radioactive chemicals; they were told by hospital staff and researchers that they were joining a "science club".

Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal government, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hospital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582 Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren as an alternative to adenoidectomy.[83][84][85] Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II.[83] Nasal radium irradiation became a standard medical treatment and was used in over two and a half million Americans.[83]

In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive calcium orally and intravenously. They also injected radioactive chemicals into malnourished babies and then pushed needles through their skulls, into their brains, through their necks, and into their spines to collect cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.[79][86]

A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal Clinical Science[105] described a medical experiment in which researchers intentionally blistered the skin on the abdomens of 41 children, who ranged in age from 8 to 14, using cantharide. The study was performed to determine how severely the substance injures/irritates the skin of children. After the studies, the children's blistered skin was removed with scissors and swabbed with peroxide.[88]

Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allan Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber where he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time.[135] Cameron also induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large injections of insulin, twice a day, for up to two months at a time.[116] Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.

This suggested that the CIA researchers were, as one author put it "a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons", rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities; they had arranged for torture, rape and psychological abuse of adults and young children, driving many of them permanently insane.

In 1939, at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa, twenty-two children were the subjects of the so-called "monster" experiment. This experiment attempted to use psychological abuse to induce stuttering in children who spoke normally. The experiment was designed by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation's most prominent speech pathologists, for the purpose of testing one of his theories on the cause of stuttering.

In 1962, researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children. They continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.

From early 1940 until 1953, Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who practiced at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on at least 100 children. The children's ages ranged from 3–12 years. Some reports indicate that she may have performed such experiments on more than 200. From 1942 to 1956, electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital, including Bender's experiments; from 1956 to 1969, ECT was used at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service. Publicly, Bender claimed that the results of the "therapy" were positive, but in private memos, she expressed frustration over mental health issues caused by the treatments.[174] Bender would sometimes shock children with schizophrenia (some less than three years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive days. Several of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments.[175]

Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It’s his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, “Let me go, please. I don’t want to be here. Please, let me go.” Bobby’s physician looks irritated and she tells him, “Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax.” Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.

Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and mother didn’t want her any longer. She had become too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of his young daughter. Mary’s mother had never wanted her anyway and was happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and sits staring at the wall. She doesn’t move at all. After about ten minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, “God isn’t coming back today. He’s too busy. He won’t be back here for weeks.”

From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with “autistic schizophrenia.” In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her.

Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock sessions had become nearly catatonic.

Years later, another of Bender’s young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a “multiple murderer.” Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A 1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender’s young electroshock patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were worse off after the “therapy” and that some had become suicidal after treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel “Valley of the Dolls.” Susann’s son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender’s care a nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had “destroyed” her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his treatment.

To their credit, some of Dr. Bender’s colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children “scandalous,” but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and true pioneer in the study of autistic children, “[Lauretta Bender] claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital – the back up to Bellevue – and he described the arrival of these children. He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the treatment.” (This writer could find no case where any of Bender’s colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best characterized by their “capacity for laziness” and “ability to dance,” both features, Bender claimed, of the “specific brain impulses” of African-Americans.)

About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other “treatment endeavors.” These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.

Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert Hyde on numerous occasions in order “to address overly aggressive behavior.” One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its approval of Metrazol.

Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures – including broken necks and backs – and joint dislocations are not uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.

A November 1936 Time magazine article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing “irreversible shock” as a “great danger.” The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: “A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions…. A patient is seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless.”

The Army, the CIA and Metrazol

Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several “safe houses and holding areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel” – a former Nazi interrogation center taken over by the US – were operated by a “special unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert Sensenig. The unit was especially notorious in its applications of interrogation methods [including the use of electroshock and Metrazol, mescaline, amphetamines and other drugs].” Said Hunt: “The unit took great pride in their nicknames, the ‘Rough Boys’ and the ‘Kraut Gauntlet,’ and didn’t hold back with any drug or technique … you name it, they used it.” Added Hunt, “Sensenig was really disappointed when it was found that nothing had to be used on [former Reichsmarschall] Herman Goering, who was processed through the camp. Goering needed no inducement to talk.”

Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several “former” Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC’s Rough Boys would routinely use Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and conventional electroshock units.

Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and rendered subjects held at the many “black sites” maintained across the globe. Observed one former officer recently, “They would twist up like a pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads.”

In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of “mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror.” It is not known if the investigation has been completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon prisoners concerns one-time alleged “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, who had originally been accused of wanting to set off a “dirty bomb.” The charge was later forced, but Padilla was held in solitary confinement for many months and forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.

The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that, when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the question of “what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11 conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can’t hear the names of the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as the authority in charge of research concerning “consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques,” while at the same time is also responsible for “inherently controversial topics” that might attract media interest or “challenge by interest groups.”

Dr. Bender Discovers LSD

In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender’s earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA’s MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953. About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain’s MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.

Dr. Fink, who was greatly admired by Bender, is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States. In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a fully cleared CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, CIA officials under the direction of Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of the agency’s Security Research Service (SRS) that oversaw Artichoke, worked closely with Fink in New York City in efforts to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one CIA document, Fink told officials “an individual could gradually be reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable level.”

In addition to Fink, Bender also greatly admired the work of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist who also consulted closely with the CIA on electroshock matters. Kalinowsky, who was part Jewish and had fled Germany in 1933, was Fink’s close friend and, like Fink, was widely recognized as an expert on electroconvulsive therapy. Kalinowsky met with the CIA’s Allen and Gaynor frequently and sometimes was accompanied by Dr. Fink at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he worked closely with Dr. Hoch.

While it is clear from Dr. Bender’s papers that she also considered the early LSD work of “Dr.” Alfred M. Hubbard in Vancouver, Canada, to be “very substantial and beneficial,” it is important to state here that Hubbard was not a physician nor did he have any formal medical training. Hubbard, a jovial character who sometimes worked with the FBI and CIA, was a strong proponent of the use of LSD. Despite the fact that he had no medical credentials and once served time in prison for smuggling, he hoodwinked the Sandoz Chemical Co. into supplying him such ample amounts of LSD that he dispersed so widely and abundantly that he earned the title “The Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Hubbard’s use of LSD in allegedly curing alcoholism is still cited today. How Hubbard so easily passed as a physician is unknown. Even a 1961 paper published by New York Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, and authored by Dr. A.M. Freedman, cited Hubbard’s LSD work with “children, primarily delinquents” to have been 85% successful.”

Other physicians whom Dr. Bender consulted about the effects of LSD on children were Drs. Ronald A. Sandison, Thomas M. Ling and John Buckman. These three worked in England at both the Chelsea Clinic in London and Potwick Hospital in Worcestershire, outside of London. Sandison is credited with having been the first person to bring LSD into England, this in 1952 after he met Albert Hofmann in Basle, Switzerland, at the Sandoz Chemical laboratories. Hofmann handed Sandison a box of around 600 ampules, each containing 100 micrograms of LSD. Back in England, Sandison shared his psychedelic bounty with associates Drs. Ling and Buckman. Before the year was out, Sandison also turned Hubbard on to LSD, guiding Hubbard through his first trip. Sandison also began a new treatment program at the Gothic-looking Potwick facility that he dubbed Psycholytic Therapy. His program’s patients were mostly schizophrenics. In 1958, an LSD treatment unit was established at Potwick. Over the years, it has been reported that the CIA, MI6 and the Macy Foundation secretly helped finance the unit. Dr. Elkes helped by raising about $75,000 for the unit’s operation. For the next ten years the unit administered over 15,000 doses of LSD to about 900 patients.

Drs. Buckman and Ling worked closely with Sandison in the Potwick unit. In 1963, Buckman and Ling wrote in a publication, describing “good examples” of the use of LSD in psycholytic psychotherapy: “The patients’ experiences under LSD have not supported Marx’s dictum that Religion is the opium of the people but rather that there is a deep basic belief in a Supreme Being, whether the religion background be Christian, Jewish or Hindu.”

Dr. Buckman also worked at London’s Chelsea Clinic, often times treating adults and sometimes children. Buckman believed strongly that “frigidity” in women could be treated successfully with LSD. In 1967, he said of LSD: “Many therapists believe that a transcendental experience – a feeling that it is a good world and one is a part of it – is a curative experience in itself.” According to several informed sources in the London, for years MI6, the British intelligence service and the CIA closely monitored the LSD work conducted by Sandison, Ling and Buckman.

Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman

Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were “quite taken with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from the drug.” Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD “treatments” at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:

“As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister – namely that we participate in some sort of ‘research’ that both our parents had also participated in. Whether the word ‘experiment’ was used, I don’t recall. The term ‘LSD’ was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were ‘taking’ this drug as a form of ‘quick therapy’ – their term for it – that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view. While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound, rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an ‘industrial strength narcissist,’ as I later called him. My mother was a submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own, other than being a doctor’s wife.

“My sister and I, however, were about as ‘normal’ as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities. We didn’t need ‘therapy.’ We were told we would get a day off from school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls’ school that persuaded us to do it. I wasn’t aware of making a ‘decision.’ The purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10 sessions – once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January 1960.

“The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief ‘interview’ by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention, for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not mentioned. The word ‘experiment’ was not used. There was, in other words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years and never explained why they did it.

“During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don’t know who the person was. Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images – nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter, followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was terrifying.

“There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no ‘debriefing,’ no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to participate after I first experienced it, I don’t know. But as an adult and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The ‘power differential’ is huge between parents and children and the dependence on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc. Our father was a doctor, after all – it was hard to grasp that he would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don’t think this way initially. A child’s dependency usually means trusting one’s parents or caregivers.

“Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares – visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn’t sleep. I was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways, more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant that my parents had known full well that the experience would very likely be frightening – and hadn’t cared.

“I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still dependent on them, however and so was my sister.

“Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don’t know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents’ response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was ‘diagnosed’ as a ‘psychiatric’ case and the more medication she was given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully recovered from that first episode.

“Our parents responded to my sister’s anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was ‘classified’ as a psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in the name of ‘treatment’ seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and torture.

“The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician – and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected psychiatrist – made it impossible to expose them or go against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the health and well being of my sister.

“My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.

“On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was – and is – corrupted by the drug industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to further the development of drugs as weapons – both for interrogation potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of children and teenagers in the medical environment.

“Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was an ‘enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.’ When I pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed it, including the presumption that I must be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ to propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to LSD.

“Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I ‘met’ Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the university medical school in the United States where he was on the faculty.

“I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn’t seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one of his ‘subjects’ and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about the LSD experiments in London.

“‘You will never work in bioethics again,’ they said.

“The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don’t know what the exact term would be, but I suspect there is a form of psychological ‘doubling’ at work – the sort of thing that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton’s book, The Nazi Doctors who were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to ‘first, do no harm,’ and to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.

“The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves ’caused’ her disintegration or not. In law this is called a ‘contributing cause.’ I learned that people cover up the most awful things, not just within a family but within communities, within universities, within ‘polite society.’ There is probably no absolute barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur.”

Dr. Bender’s LSD Experiments on Children

Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about 55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender’s work with children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the “operational benefits of Dr. Bender’s work as related to children and LSD,” and requested to be kept “closely appraised of the possible links between Dr. Bender’s project and those being conducted under separate MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere.”

In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children’s Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. The LSD she used was supplied by Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. (Dr. Bircher also provided Bender with UML-491, also a Sandoz-produced product, very much like LSD but sometimes “dreamier” in effect and longer lasting.) Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14 children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11. (Because diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders have changed over the decades, one cannot assess what actual conditions these children really had.) There were 11 boys and three girls, ranging in age from six to ten years old.

Jean Marie is almost seven years old. She came here nearly a year ago after her parents abandoned her to the care of an aunt who had no interest in raising her. Marie, who prefers to be called Jean, is shy, withdrawn, and distrustful of most adults she encounters. There are reports she may have been sexually molested by her uncle … Despite her withdrawn nature she smiles easily, and enjoys the company of other children. After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month, Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age … In the past week, she seems to have become easily agitated and has lost any interest in reading, something she seemed to very much enjoy before treatment.

In a published report on her 196 LSD experiments with 14 “autistic schizophrenic” children, Bender states she initially gave each of the children 25 mcg. of LSD “intramuscularly while under continuous observation.” She writes: “The two oldest boys, over ten years, near or in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior. The oldest and most disturbed received Amytal sodium 150 mg. intramuscularly and returned to his usual behavior.” Both boys were then excluded from the experiment.

The 12 remaining children were then given injections of 25 mcg. of LSD and then days later were each given 100 mcg. of LSD once a week. Bender’s report states: “Then it was increased gradually to twice and three times a week as no untoward side-effects were noticed…. Finally, it was given daily and this continued for six weeks until the time of this report.”

Bender’s findings and conclusions concerning her LSD experiments indicated she found the use of the drug promising. Bender reported: “In general, they [the children] were happier; their mood was ‘high’ in the hours following the ingestion of the drug … they have become more spontaneously playful with balls and balloons … their color is rosy rather than blue or pale and they have gained weight.” Bender concluded: “The use of these drugs [LSD, UML-401, UML-491] … will give us more knowledge about both the basic schizophrenic process and the defensive autism in children and also about the reaction of these dilysergic acid derivatives as central and autonomic nervous system stimulants and serotonin antagonists. Hopefully these drugs will also contribute to our efforts to find better therapeutic agents for early childhood schizophrenia.”

In an article published in 1970, Dr. Bender reported on the results of LSD dosing upon “two adolescent boys who were mildly schizophrenic.” She reported that the boys experienced perceptual distortions. They thought the researchers were making faces at them, that their pencils were becoming “rubbery,” and one boy reported the other boy’s face had turned green. The boys began to complain that they were being experimented upon. Even so, Bender and her associate continued the two male adolescents on a regimen of 150 mcg. per day, in divided doses, of LSD. While one of the boys supposedly “benefited very much,” Bender reported that he later returned to the hospital as “a disturbed adult schizophrenic.” The other boy kept complaining that he was being experimented upon and they stopped giving him LSD, not because of the drug’s effects itself, Bender explained, but “because of the boy’s attitude towards it,” which she attributed to “his own psychopathology.”

U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies against Native Americans

By Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Historian

US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.

In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.

So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.”ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.

The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.

In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.iii

The followings acts are punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.

Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.

Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”iv

The so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.

After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.v Creating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.

By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.ix

The situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.

Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].x

According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”xi Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.

Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.

US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”xii Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.

Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.

Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.

In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.

Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.

First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.

Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xvii

Grenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies–also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviii

So, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.xix This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States.

In the service of the phony center, the press also utilizes a “triangulation strategy” to soften and minimize the most egregious atrocities taking place in the country. If there were a chance that people might learn of the secret government literally holding people as electronic slaves in distributed concentration camps created from the victim’s own homes and minds, the CIA would be portrayed as fighting the slave trade overseas. See, I cannot argue with fighting slavery overseas. It is a good thing, assuming it is real and not just more PR propaganda. But now it has purposely distracted from the domestic abuses. The general rule is to triangulate by emphasizing something similar to the domestic problem except that it is not quite so bad or is committed by bad criminals the government is chasing or by foreign groups or governments. It masks the most serious abuses (people can only concentrate on so many things). Someone not familiar with the idea of masking by triangulation might even think someone in the press was trying to help but, gosh, here at least is a watered-down something.

Triangulation here is similar to the “limited hang-out” strategy so often used by intelligence agencies when they fear worse exposures of their crimes. That is, they admit a few abuses that are bad but hardly the worst abuses or the bulk of the abuses, play up those admissions for a time, and then declare that “it’s time to move on.” Amazingly enough, after a few years they often begin denying and hiding the few admissions they actually made and we have what Robert Parry has called lost history (though most of the actual history was never revealed anyway).

Finally, in denying and covering up mind control crimes there are witting “assets” and collaborators in all parts of society. To say it is Stasi-like is not going too far. Some are profiting directly from this exploitation and enslavement, while others profit indirectly or hope to not become another victim by collaborating. Too many Americans are just plain cruel and barbaric. There are “assets,” apologists, and collaborators in the advertising and entertainment businesses, in academia, in science and engineering, anywhere you might look. Some are likely just following the cues of the unspoken dialogue and symbolism, while others are directly connected. Some may be mind control victims themselves, aware of it or not. This is a real, live conspiracy of the sort that Americans love to ridicule others for pointing out. I do not put anything past people who would participate in systematic torture, including manufacturing news “events” for distracting, discrediting, and as a launching point for their desired spin.